Will George Osborne regret being too posh for a pasty?

The Greggs affair will forever haunt this Chancellor.

If you happen to walk down your local high street today, pause a Proustian moment by the open doorway of Greggs and linger a while. That’s not to imply you’ve ever been inside – of course not!

Well, maybe just the once, and actually that sausage and bean melt was absolutely delicio… but you were on holiday and the kids were hungry, and what happened in Scarborough, stays in Scarborough, so just stick to the line that you don’t remember. Now close your eyes as the seductive aroma of flaky puff pastry and greasy cheese-and-onion filling caresses your nostrils and saturates your soft palate. Hmmm. Remember the mouth-watering sensation and mark it well, for you are breathing in the heady scent of George Osborne’s fate.

The Chancellor may have snatched away benefits from mewling newborns, clobbered grannies and fawned over the super-rich, but his political reputation has been forever, ignominously heat-sealed inside a Greggs savoury.

When his economic strategy has been long-forgotten, the grey-power brigade have emigrated to Liechtenstein, and the short-lived applause for his tax transparency has died down, the one thing that Britain will remember him for is being Too Posh for a Pasty.

Peevish MPs routinely complain about the trivialisation of politics, but to do so misses the point: the devil is in the detail. Public and press alight on the minutiae not because it’s frivolous, but because a symbol can say so much more about a statesman’s mettle than a raft of impenetrable, cyclically adjusted targets. That pasty’s not just fast food, it’s a fast track into the cholesterol-laden heart of Britain’s body politic.

Over in the US, there’s a board game called Campaign Manager 2008, in which the US presidential race between Barack Obama and John McCain can be played out. Germany has Die Macher, in which seven regional political races take place, followed by a general election, demanding complex strategic thinking over four hours.

And here in the UK, home not just to the pasty but to the Mother of all Parliaments as well? Well, we have a word association game that can be done and dusted in minutes, but is no less meaningful for that.

Duck house? Sir Peter Viggers in particular, money-grubbing MPs’ expenses in general. Handbag? Mrs Thatcher and a whole new abrasive, upfront style of government, unafraid to give even the most sacred of cows a resounding thwack! with a matt black Asprey.

Wallace and Gromit? Ed Miliband and Ed Balls – one has the air of a hapless dweeb, the other of a pugnacious scrapper, together forming a caricature of a party devoid of gravitas or appeal.

Police horse? David Cameron and the unhealthy harnessing of politics and News International. Underpants? John Major never escaped the millstone of being represented as grey and ineffectual, with his Y-fronts outside his trousers after the Labour spin doctor Alastair Campbell mischievously claimed he’d seen the PM tuck his shirt into his underwear. This unexpected emphasis on his wayward pants proved prescient, after it was revealed, years later, that Major had a torrid affair with Edwina Currie. When she blithely aired their dirty laundry to flog her autobiography, he observed that their four-year affair was “the one event in my life of which I am most ashamed”, which came as a surprise to those of us who felt that presiding over Black Wednesday might have warranted an honourable mention.

But then politicos are egoists at heart. It’s all about them, which is why they respond with such humourlessness when we, the electorate, refuse to take them as seriously as they take themselves.

You see, George, David and Ed, it’s the little things that rankle most in any relationship. Just ask Mr and Mrs Rae, the Northampton couple who are divorcing because he used the washing machine too much and she threw his packed lunches in the bin, because she didn’t approve of him buying meat from intensively reared livestock. Mrs Rae appeared to be taken aback that their internecine warfare might constitute grounds for divorce. But once contempt creeps into a partnership, all is lost.

And so when the Chancellor, who was quite happy to impose VAT on hot takeaway food, loftily mumbled that he couldn’t recall the last time he ate a pasty from Greggs, he was lambasted for being out of touch. And he richly deserved it – not for being too grand to rub his Savile Row shoulders with the lads from the building site at lunchtime, but for failing to have enough savvy to fib about it.

Osborne, who has a £3 million house in Notting Hill and owns shares in the family’s upmarket fabric and wallpaper firm, Osborne & Little, isn’t short of a bob or two – rumour has it, he once tried to pay on the Tube with a real oyster – which renders him remote to begin with. Until Fortnum & Mason start stocking Greggs-branded bake-them-at-home frozen sausage rolls, or Sam Cam serves them up at a particularly frugal Downing Street fundraising supper, it’s doubtful that he will ever clap eyes on a pasty, much less tuck into one while wandering down Whitehall. By comparison, he makes the PM look like an Estuary English man of the people – quite possibly the reason why he was given the Treasury gig in the first place.

And to demonstrate that very fact, Cameron has since hastily announced he loves a nice Cornish pasty. But this, in turn, has led to accusations of ambient snack elitism, because the West Cornwall Pasty Company sells its upper-crust pasty for £3.40, compared to £1.19 for the Greggs version. Plus, Cameron claims to have bought said controversial snack at Leeds railway station, which hasn’t had a branch since 2007.

Meanwhile, Ed and Ed set up a hasty photo-opportunity in a branch of Greggs to demonstrate how “street” they were, larkily getting in a round of sausage rolls, but it just smacked of the schoolboy stunt it patently was.

So as the pasty plot thickens, does it really matter? Yes and no. No, because it’s not the silly season and there are serious issues to be tackled: a sclerotic economy, unemployment, industrial action over pensions… and if we close our eyes, Europe might just go away. In fact, it’s all gone so quiet, it appears to have upped and offed already.

And yes, because it matters to Greggs, which has been selling hot pastries for 70 years, has 1,500 shops nationwide, and saw £30 million wiped off its share price in the wake of last week’s Budget.

It matters to Greggs customers, already hard-pressed financially, who will have to pay extra for a hot snack, although there is a ridiculous amount of Pooterish confusion about the point at which VAT kicks in on the cold-lukewarm-piping-hot continuum.

Finally, it matters to the wider public, because this is more, much more than a fatuous furore over politicians’ patrician eating habits. Pastygate is important because it throws into sharp relief that the current Cabinet has been drawn, almost exclusively, from the ranks of the wealthy. Of 29 ministers entitled to attend Cabinet meetings, 23 have assets and investments estimated to be worth more than £1 million.

No wonder there is a gap between them and us. It is a gaping chasm that even a job lot of chicken bakes and spicy parcels won’t ever fill.